Campus collaboration

Foreign universities find working in China harder than they expected

LIKE their counterparts around the world in just about any other industry, administrators in higher education in the West can be forgiven for looking at the writing on the wall and seeing Chinese characters. Whether for the narrow purpose of generating revenue or the broader goal of engaging more deeply with a rapidly emerging and ever more important nation, foreign universities are scrambling to recruit in China as well as to establish or expand their presence there.

Britain’s Lancaster University, New York’s Juilliard School, which specialises in music, and Duke University in North Carolina, are just the latest foreign institutions to pile into an already crowded marketplace. Other co-operative and exchange programmes in higher education are being announced almost every month. Some recruit Chinese students to foreign universities, or foreign students to Chinese ones. Others take the form of research facilities or academic-exchange centres. Some offer dual degrees. The most ambitious involve building, staffing and operating satellite campuses in China.

None of them finds it easy to work with an academic system whose standards and values are so different from those in the West. Not least of the hurdles is maintaining scholarly independence in China’s restrictive political environment. The Communist Party sees universities partly as training grounds for loyalists who will one day be leaders in government and business. The study of Marxism is compulsory for all except foreigners.

The collapse of a Beijing-based undergraduate programme jointly run by two elite institutions—Yale University in America and Peking University—has highlighted some of the difficulties that foreigners face. Yale’s administrators pulled the plug in July, citing high expenses, low enrolment and weaknesses in its Chinese-language programme.

In 2007 less than a year after the programme was launched, a visiting Yale faculty member, Stephen Stearns, wrote an open letter complaining about the rampant plagiarism he claimed was being committed by many of his Chinese students. “When a student I am teaching steals words and ideas from an author without acknowledgment, I feel cheated,” said Mr Stearns. “I ask myself, why should I teach people who knowingly deceive me?” He added that such practices appeared to be widely tolerated by Chinese academics, and suggested that the nation had lost its way.

However, Yale’s experience has not deterred others from coming in, with strong encouragement from the Chinese government. Officials hope such ventures will stop academic talent moving abroad, and push Chinese universities to improve.

But plagiarism, false credentials and research, and cheating on tests, remain obstacles for foreign universities in China. “Academic culture in China is such that the kind of value system we have in place is not part of the woodwork here,” says Denis Simon, who oversees Arizona State University’s dealings with China.

In the past year the number of Chinese institutions participating in Arizona State’s dual-degree programme, which allows participating students to gain an American and a Chinese degree, has risen from three to 33. About 95% of students achieve the grades they need to enter the fifth year of study that results in a master’s degree from Arizona State.

That high success rate, Mr Simon says, requires heavy investment in sending academic staff to China to screen candidates. “We want high-quality people with good English and the ability to pay. Given the level of fraud and fake documents, it is worth the big investment it takes for us to do it this way,” he says.

Foreign scholars collaborating with institutions in China sometimes fret about how to handle politically sensitive topics or curriculum materials. Dali Yang, who heads a research and conference centre in Beijing run by the University of Chicago, says there are few political constraints on the workshops or classes he organises. Even for public events, he says he does not try to deter academics who work on such sensitive topics as population-control policies or the use of executed prisoners as organ donors for transplants. But he suggests a need for academics to be cautious. “They have good judgment and know to be respectful of what goes on here. That doesn’t mean they have to shut up, but they know it won’t go well if they go so far that Chinese counterparts won’t be able to participate,” he says.

In November Lee Bollinger, the president of Columbia University in New York, said his institution’s academic centre in Beijing, which opened in 2009, would uphold academic “freedom and openness”. He added that if anything threatened to compromise its “fundamental values”, Columbia would have to leave China.